# Distributed Asymmetric Key Decryption with threshold

Threshold decryption of public key encryption schemes allows the decryption key to be distributed among trustees. Then, to decrypt the cipher text it requires at least threshold t trustees to run the decryption protocol in order to get the plain text.

Now most of the literature is either based on generic multiparty computation computation (which I am not keen on for some reason) or based on distributed RSA decryption and sharing RSA functions.

Are there any other ways of achieving distributed asymmetric key threshold decryption?
Will elliptic curves be a good choice for distributing the decryption?

-
You can create a random symmetric key for each message, apply shamir secret sharing to it (symmetric secret sharing) and then encrypt each share with a different public key. –  CodesInChaos Sep 6 '13 at 10:09
I heard about this technique from a colleague. but could not locate the actual reference of the paper . do u have it ? –  sashank Sep 6 '13 at 13:12
No idea if anybody wrote a paper about it. It's just a straight forward and useful combination of asymmetric encryption and shamir secret sharing. I came up with it myself and I expect many others to have done so before me. –  CodesInChaos Sep 8 '13 at 13:31
yes, some other colleague also impromptuly gave me this idea . but some how it is not fitting squarely in my application . thanks anyway ! –  sashank Sep 8 '13 at 15:03

I assume you say on the threshold encryption scheme, in which a dealer generates $(PK,SK_1,\dots,SK_n)$ and distributes the secret keys to users indexed by $1,\dots,n$, and if a combiner obtains $t$ partially-decrypted ciphertexts, it can retrieve a plaintext.